Other Marvell disk controller chip support in FreeBSD?

M

Mike234534

Just asking that what kind of support controllers based on Marvell chips, such as AOC-SAT2-MV8, have on FreeBSD? With some Googling I found some old threads claiming that there were problems, but is that still the case?
 
It is supported by mvs(4) driver, which was developed without any documentation and errata access from Marvell. So I would say that it worked acceptably in my lab (I could not trigger any bugs) last time I tested it, but I've never used it in production. It may possibly be fine for SOHO, but I would probably not put it into critical production. Though choice of inexpensive multi-port SATA controllers for PCI-X is rather limited. If four ports would be enough, I would probably prefer some board on SiI3124 chip -- it is also not perfect, but it is documented and IMHO much better designed.
 
You probably don't want either of those nowdays, even the now old LSI 9211-8i (IBM M1015 etc) would probably be the oldest controller I'd consider. If you want something cheap you'll probably have a decent (better) experience with one or two controller cards using the ASMedia 1061 chipset which also uses the standard AHCI interface.
//Danne
 
diizzy, I would be 100% agree with you if the original question would not be about AOC-SAT2-MV8 card, which is PCI-X. Unless that is confusion, I suppose the question may be about some old server, that may not have PCIe slots. Otherwise -- you are right.
 
True, it might be that he's looking for a PCI controller as PCI-X is backwards compatible just keep in mind that you need extra clearance.
I don't know exactly when it happened but I was pleasantly surprised that my old Promise TX4 SATA 300 card performed much better in 10.X than back in 7.X and/or 8.X. Running a RAID-Z array (4 HDDs) off it resulted in 15-20mbyte/s tops where in 10.X it managed to do around 40-50mbyte/s. It's far from great but it's at least better than the dreaded Sil3112 controllers....
//Danne
 
mav@ said:
diizzy, I would be 100% agree with you if the original question would not be about AOC-SAT2-MV8 card, which is PCI-X. Unless that is confusion, I suppose the question may be about some old server, that may not have PCIe slots. Otherwise -- you are right.
Click to expand...

Actually my current server has both PCI-X and PCI-e slots. I'm currently using Sil3124 controllers that are leftovers from my earlier setup which didn't have PCI-e, but recently I have had some problems with them as described here: https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/...-crc-errors-when-resilvering-scrubbing.50138/

Basically they seem to become unstable when they have been under load for a while. They have worked fine after the resilver finished, but I haven't dared to scrub the pool in case that the problems reappear.

Anyways, the reason I was looking at AOC-SAT2-MV8 is that it's much cheaper than M1015, and it doesn't require SAS cables (which would incur some additional costs). The server in question is just my NAS box that I use to host some games, too, so it's not some absolutely critical production environment, though stability is always nice.
 
I dont know how many drives you need but go for ASMedia based controller cards if you want something cheap.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...1_sata_host_controller-_-16-124-045-_-Product
http://www.amazon.com/Crest-Port-SA...e=UTF8&qid=1424012670&sr=8-1&keywords=ASM1061

http://www.ebay.com/itm/IBM-ServeRa...739?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item3aa26edd2b
80 USD isn't so bad, although I don't know where you live.

These days I stay away from everything that doesn't do AHCI (without quirks) and/or LSI controllers because it gives me less headaches.
//Danne
 
diizzy said:
I dont know how many drives you need but go for ASMedia based controller cards if you want something cheap.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...1_sata_host_controller-_-16-124-045-_-Product
http://www.amazon.com/Crest-Port-SA...e=UTF8&qid=1424012670&sr=8-1&keywords=ASM1061

http://www.ebay.com/itm/IBM-ServeRa...739?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item3aa26edd2b
80 USD isn't so bad, although I don't know where you live.

These days I stay away from everything that doesn't do AHCI (without quirks) and/or LSI controllers because it gives me less headaches.
//Danne
Click to expand...

While four extra ports would be enough for current drives, I'd prefer to have some more in case I need them later. My server has Tyan Thunder K8WE, which has just two 16x PCI-e slots (and three PCI-X ones).

I live in Finland, which means that I have to pay 24% VAT for purchases outside EU, and that includes shipping costs. That's a big reason why I'd prefer something cheap, but forking out $100 + taxes is an option if there are no good alternatives. For example, AOC-SAT-MV8 costs less than half of M1015 after shipping: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Supermicro-...145?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item4aac7985b9
 
 
diizzy said:
Here you go:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/CONTROLLER-...ontroller_per_PC_e_Server&hash=item2c96cd9891
http://www.ebay.com/itm/IBM-ServeRa...785?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_3&hash=item46349584b1

http://www.ebay.de/itm/PCI-E-PCI-Ex...79?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_77&hash=item4d22b7905b
http://www.amazon.de/PCI-Express-Co...e=UTF8&qid=1424014435&sr=8-1&keywords=asm1061

I have no idea what if you have something like idealo (.de) or pricespy (uk and nz) in .fi which would make it a lot easier to find something in your country.
//Danne
Click to expand...

There's one eBay-like web site in here, and one ad site, but they rarely have relatively specialized stuff like these, and prices are usually high. I have been looking at German eBay, but M1015 tends to go for 100 euros (~$115) or more as the final bids, plus there's still about 10-20 euros for shipping costs.
 
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